Chapter 6
The ship was too fucking small.
If this had been a locker room, some red-faced coach would have been screaming about spacing and making them run drills until they learned how not to take each other’s heads off in close quarters.
If it had been a holding cell, the wardens would have split them up by now just to avoid the inevitable bloodbath.
Instead, it was a human freighter built for three crew who actually liked each other.
He’d never realized ships came this small.
And at present, it held one pilot who tolerated him, one cartridge that openly loathed him, and Raaze, who occupied what felt like half the draanthing ship all by himself.
He flattened his back to the galley bulkhead as Cait squeezed past him. The whole thing was now a daily negotiation. A cramped little dance of not touching that took more concentration than a championship final.
“Excuse me,” she muttered without looking up.
“You’re excused.”
Yeah, he knew he was being a draanthic, but he couldn’t seem to stop himself. Not when she avoided looking at him at all.
She shoved an empty ration wrapper into the chute, stepped back, then turned for another hydration pouch from the dispenser. Her shoulder passed within an inch of his chest.
“Oxygen consumption is currently holding at one hundred and twelve percent of projected baseline,” Fred said from the overhead speaker. “This is largely due to the passenger’s metabolic rate, which appears to be less ‘standard humanoid’ and more ‘industrial furnace in a leather jacket’.”
Raaze huffed a laugh. At least the cartridge had jokes. They were terrible, but they were still jokes.
“Noted, Fred,” Cait said, ripping open the pouch.
“I am merely pointing out that if he stopped breathing so aggressively, we might extend the scrubber life by six hours.”
“I’ll try to shallow breathe,” Raaze said. “Wouldn’t want to inconvenience the hardware.”
“Your consideration is noted. And rejected. Your mass alone is costing us point-four percent fuel efficiency on the drag coefficient.”
Raaze picked up the protein bar Cait had left on the counter for him and bit into it. It was all chalk and cardboard… like misery compressed into edible form. He ate it anyway. Beggars couldn’t be choosers.
Cait drank from the pouch without looking at him. Three days ago, she’d been sharp-eyed and furious on the slabcrete, and now the exhaustion had eaten all of that away. Now all that was left was a woman running on caffeine and stubbornness, with dark smudges under her eyes.
Sealing the pouch, she stood. “I’m going forward. Check the seals on the airlock if you get bored. The sensor is twitchy again.”
“On it.”
She slid past him, carrying the scent of engine coolant and stale coffee with her.
He watched her go and kept his mouth shut, and she let him, and that was as close to functional as they’d managed so far.
He finished the bar in two bites, tossed the wrapper into the recycler, and wiped his hands on his pants.
Then he counted to three and followed her down the corridor.
He didn’t check the airlock seals. Instead, he headed for the cockpit.
She was already in the pilot’s chair, blue light from the nav-display washing up over her face. Her fingers moved over the console in a rapid dance as he braced a shoulder against the frame.
“I won,” he said.
She didn’t turn, looking across at another screen. “Congratulations. You won what? The award for ‘Most Likely to Bankrupt a Small Haulage Company’?”
“The bet.”
That got a reaction. Not much of one, just a tiny hitch as her fingers hovered above the board for half a breath before they started moving again.
“What bet?”
“The one from Parac’Norr.” He kept his voice low. Easy. “I deliver the part, I get a kiss. I delivered the part.”
“You stole the part! From the garrison… which triggered an alarm. Which is why we’re in this mess in the first place.”
“Delivery method wasn’t specified.”
She spun the chair around to face him.
“Besides,” she said, leaning back and crossing her arms, “Your stake was my penalty clause. Full lost revenue. That was your exact wording.”
“Correct.”
“Money you didn’t have.”
He held her stare. “Also correct.”
“So if you’d lost, I’d have been owed a debt you couldn’t pay by a male I didn’t know on a planet I couldn’t get off.” She tipped her head, tapping one finger against her bicep. “That’s not a wager, Raaze. That’s a con.”
Well, trall. She had him there. He should have dodged or deflected. Turned on the charm like he’d done in a hundred bars on a hundred worlds. He had lines for this and a whole polished little routine.
Instead, he smiled. Not the one he’d sold to crowds and cameras and sponsors for most of his adult life, but the one underneath it. Slower. Warmer. Just for her.
“Oh, you’re good,” he said softly. “Beautiful as well.”
She blinked, and her gaze flicked to his mouth, then back to his eyes so fast most people wouldn’t have caught it. He did. And draanth, his pulse kicked hard at the base of his throat.
He uncrossed his arms.
“So that’s the ruling?” he asked softly. “I owe you.”
“You owe me,” she said.
Her voice was steady, but the tiny, frantic beat in the hollow of her throat told a different story.
“Fair enough.” He let his voice drop, soft enough that the drive core’s hum seemed to carry the words the rest of the way. “Do I get the kiss anyway?”
She looked at him. Her lips parted, just a fraction, and her eyes stayed on his long enough that the silence in the cockpit turned into something else entirely.
The nav-display ticked softly behind her, and the drive core hummed.
She didn’t blink, didn’t look away, and he stopped breathing because if he moved, whatever was building between them would shatter.
Then she stood, slow and deliberate, and crossed the deck plates between them. She stopped close enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin and catch the faint scent of her hair. When she reached up and cupped his jaw, her callused fingers sliding along the line of it, he forgot to breathe.
Her mouth pressed to his. Warm, dry, and certain. At the first brush of her lips, all his thought processes scattered to the four corners of the Empire.
Then she broke the kiss and stepped back. Her hand left his jaw, and the sudden absence of it bit cold against his skin.
Three seconds. Maybe less. And it hit him like a round straight to the chest plating.
Not because it was the best kiss he’d ever had—He’d had wilder, deeper, more erotic… the full back catalog—but because she hadn’t yielded a single draanthing inch of it. Her hand on his jaw had steered the whole thing, start to finish, and he’d just… let her.
“We’re even,” she said and sat back in the pilot’s chair.
“Fred,” she said in a voice so level it was almost insulting, “run the diagnostic on the port thruster again. I want to know if that vibration is a sensor ghost or a cracked housing.”
“Running,” Fred said. “Housing integrity is at ninety-eight percent. Vibration is likely harmonic resonance from the drive core.”
“Check it anyway.”
Her fingers returned to the console and picked up exactly where they’d left off, while he stood in the doorway like a draanthing idiot who’d never been kissed before.
Which, for the record, he had. Multiple times. By many females, some of them famous. One of them even on a live broadcast after a championship final, which had trended across three systems for a week.
None of them had left his hands hanging at his sides like they’d forgotten what hands were for.
The pressure of her fingers still sat against his jaw like a phantom weight that wouldn’t shift. He was suddenly aware that she was typing, and what was he doing? He was standing here like some lovesick idiot who’d never seen a female before.
Say something. Literally anything. This is your whole thing.
He was the male with the lines and angles and exit strategies. He’d once talked his way out of a doping inquiry with a smile and a compliment about the investigator’s shoes.
His mind was blank.
“Right,” he said. It came out rougher than he’d meant, and she didn’t even look up, which was somehow worse than if she’d laughed at him.
Off the doorframe, he headed back down the corridor before his mouth could do anything else without consulting his brain first. He didn’t make it far.
Halfway down the passage where the light was dimmest, his legs made an executive decision to stop working.
He ended up with his shoulders against the wall, staring at the opposite bulkhead and breathing like he’d just run a full defensive rotation in kit.
Get it together. It was a kiss. Three seconds. You’ve had longer handshakes.
But his head wouldn’t cooperate. It kept snagging on the same moment… her hand on his jaw, her mouth on his, warm and certain and completely, absolutely deliberate… and every time he tried to push past it, the memory just reset and played again from the top, like a highlight reel stuck on a loop.
She’d chosen to do that. That was the part his brain couldn’t file.
Nobody had made her, nobody had pushed her, she hadn’t owed him a single thing after the stunt he’d pulled, but she’d stood up and crossed the room and put her hand on his face.
Not because he was Raaze the celebrity or Raaze the exile or Raaze the lying piece of trall who’d conned his way onto her ship.
She’d looked at him, just him, the version with nothing left to sell, and she’d still crossed the room.
He dragged a hand down over his face. His skin felt too tight.
“Draanth,” he whispered.
He shoved off the wall. He needed to move, needed to wear himself out before he turned around and went back to the cockpit and did something monumentally stupid like kiss her again.
So he headed for the cargo bay because it was the only space on this draanthing ship where he could pace without running into her.
Debt settled.